


it goes like--

by melmillo



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Disturbing Themes, F/M, Implied/Referenced Incest, Missing Scene, but no more than you'd find in the movie itself, not exactly shipfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2018-03-13 11:49:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3380420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melmillo/pseuds/melmillo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He hadn't been able to touch her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it goes like--

He hadn't been able to touch her.  
  
Later (if there was a later) Jupiter might consider that and find it funny, and even kind of pleasing. Kalique had clasped her arm with every appearance of fondness, and Titus had bowed and kissed her fingers, but from Balem she'd had nothing but the faintest stir of air as his knuckles had brushed past the curve of her cheek. Too restrained? Too afraid? Didn't matter. For all his leverage over her, his status as the eldest, his arch superiority, he’d shied away from letting his hand touch her face--until her words had struck a weak point and sparked his rage.  
  
Now, her face stinging from the slap and her throat twitching in his grasp, the humor of it seems a long way away. He's not choking her _yet_ , and the pressure of his fingers isn't quite pain, but if she makes one wrong move--

The trouble being that any move she could make now is probably a wrong one. Knowing that, she might as well go for broke. Between one blink and the next she whips up her own hand to slap him back or scratch; she wears her nails short out of necessity, but even a clipped nail could rip bloody stripes into that smug face. He might snap her neck and leave her body sprawled on the floor, but damned if she wasn't going to get a little of her own back before he did.  
  
In the split second between action and impact she sees his eyes track her movement, and he doesn't--exactly--flinch, but his shoulders tense and his sneer slips. Standing this close that giveaway's as good as a neon sign six stories high: she's startled him, badly enough that hadn't even thought to tighten his grip on her.  
  
It’s enough to make her pause, and her hand stutters, stops, hangs an inch from his face.

That leaves her--him--them frozen, stuck in a freeze-frame of a standoff. She keeps her arm up; to drop it would be to give ground, and she doesn't think he'll let her try another full-armed swing. His hand on her neck doesn’t falter. Yet he does nothing else, and when her hand twitches he's close enough that she can tell he twitches back. Second falls to second after second, and she realizes, with dawning clarity, that her raised hand, empty, weaponless, is a threat to him.  
  
Her next thoughts zip through her head like lightning flashes. Her family is somewhere inside this maze of corridors and platforms. Captain Tsing and Stinger and Caine are--she hopes to god--still above those swirling orange clouds. Whatever Balem’s got planned, the longer she delays--

Relaxing her hand is the toughest part; her nerves are strung too tight for the release of tension to be easy. But she makes it happen, muscle by tendon, until what she holds in the air is a palm and fingers again instead of a bludgeon and hooked claws meant to strike. After that she only has to let her arm go loose--not enough to drop, just enough for her hand follow to the path she’d already sent it on towards his face, slowly instead of at speed. Her fingers tremble a little, from being held so still.  
  
He must know what she intends but stays motionless as her hand moves millimeter by millimeter, until the last instant, when he moves the merest fraction--to lean away?--but it’s too late, and her fingertips and the heel of her hand come to rest against his face.

The world doesn’t end. She sees his shoulders stiffen, and his hand clenches tighter against her neck, but he does not strangle her. Likewise her own hand doesn’t seize up or twitch from shock. She feels like she ought to sigh in relief, and manages not to. It’s only her hand against a face, her skin against skin. Smooth skin, unmarred; Kalique's had felt much the same, taut and fresh as new-picked peach.  
  
That thought, the reminder of the source of that that freshness, sets her on edge again. She has to force her fingers to stay at rest and not dig her nails into that skin after all. 

She thinks she's managed it, the pads of her fingertips at rest on the solidity of flesh and cheekbone, when there's the slightest increase of pressure against her palm. Too sudden--had her hand moved without her meaning to?--and then she realizes, it’s him.  
  
He’s leaned his face into her hand. Without letting go of her throat, without changing his expression at all.

Did he even realize he’d done it?  
  
Now she did let out a breath, slowly and soundlessly as she could, to draw no attention. She’s light-headed, too cold from the recycled air and off-balance from holding herself motionless. _This family_ , she thinks, not for the first time, _is whacked-out, screwed-up, and one hundred percent wrong._ Whether it made for a decent delay or not, this had been a stupid thing to do. She’d read enough in his face and his words to connect the dots of _mother_ and _murder_ , but there’s too much here she can’t fake and doesn’t even know how to guess at, layered with the burden of a thousand generations. She might as well try to draw lines between every star in the galaxy, or balance her planetary namesake on a pin.  
  
But to yank her hand away seems too dangerous. She makes a testing retreat, drawing her fingers back the slightest bit, and the line of his cheek follows the movement. He blinks--no, not a blink, he’s closed his eyes. His mouth is nearly touching her palm; she manages not to jerk away.

So now his head rests in the cup of her hand. Some time in her dozens of millenia, his mother must have done this--perhaps in a moment of similar interrupted violence--and for an instant Jupiter has the wild, crazy conviction that she _could_ balance this weight in spite of the thread-thinness of her knowledge, if only she had a hint of the right direction. There’s some key, some combination of action and word that, if she knew it, would make him bend—not just into her hand, but under it. The pale statue wearing her face, washed in candlelight, looms in her mind’s eye. What would she have said? _Dear heart,_ maybe. _Darling boy._  
  
But she’d told the truth before: _I’m not your mother._ If there’s anything of that woman’s life hidden in her, some sense of déjà vu or echo of memory, then it’s tucked so deeply into genes and synapses that Jupiter doesn’t know how to call it up. She lets the potential words press down on her tongue for too long, and before she can steel herself to let any of them loose, her hand slides free of his face. Balem’s eyes are open again and it’s too late. She’s lost the chance.

He stares at her, and his expression is another thing she’d need to live a thousand years to know how to read. He looks as though he’s been somewhere else for a long, long, time, longer than the handful of seconds they’ve stood here. His eyes, she can see now, are pale green and flecked with brown, like a cat’s.

His hand slips from her neck as he steps back, his thumb following the line of her jawbone and chin, and then it's gone.  
  
She lets her own hand drop, and waits for the chilled air to chase away the warmth that lingers on her fingertips.

**Author's Note:**

> Man, I don't even know.
> 
> Okay, that's a lie, I do know. The scene cuts in Jupiter's first confrontation with Balem felt really weird to me: he backhands Jupiter and grabs her and gets up in her face; we cut away to the Aegis ship; we cut back and Balem's five feet away from Jupiter and offering her the abdication document.
> 
> I went to bed thinking about that, and woke up with this in my head, and writing it down was the only way to get it out.
> 
> So there you go.


End file.
